Tehran exhibits paintings by Italian painter Roberto Cozzolino

People of my country are not aware of what really goes on in Palestine and I try to show them the reality about the Palestinian people."
Italian painter, Roberto Cozzolino

The Andisheh Gallery has mounted an exhibition of works by contemporary Italian painter Roberto Cozzolino in the Iranian capital of Tehran.
Step for Freedom displays 20 works created by Cozzolino about Palestine and the plight of Palestinian people.
“I began to work on Palestine almost two years ago and tried to get in contact with supporters of the oppressed people of Palestine to help me display my paintings,” Mehr News Agency quoted Cozzolino as saying.
The 59-year-old artist said he created the works to show realities of life in Palestine to those who have been misinformed by the Western media.
“People of my country are not aware of what really goes on in Palestine and I try to show them the reality about the Palestinian people,” he said during the opening ceremony of the exhibition on August 13, 2012.
The ceremony was attended by Iran’s cultural attaché in Rome Qorbanali Pourmarjan, deputy head of Iran’s Islamic Culture and Relations Organization and a number of art lovers.
This is Cozzolino’s first visit to Iran and his paintings will be showcased until August 18, 2012.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been expelled from their homeland to the West Bank and Gaza Strip and well as countries in the region and worldwide since the 1948 Israeli occupation.
Gaza has been blockaded by Tel Aviv since 2007, a situation that has caused a decline in the standard of living, unprecedented levels of unemployment, and unrelenting poverty.
Palestinian refugees are still barred from their homeland and many are forced from their land to make way for Israeli settlements, and the Israeli administration have even stated that they do not want Palestinians to exceed 30% of the population of al-Quds (Jerusalem).
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